It doesn’t matter what L.A.’s fire budget was—no city is prepared for climate change

As multiple wildfires rage across Los Angeles, causing unprecedented levels of destruction, the city’s budget has come under scrutiny. It’s an example of misinformation that has spread during the crisis—and a sign of the increasingly complicated calculations cities will have to make to address the realities of climate change.

A number of articles criticized Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for cutting the fire department’s budget by some $23 million (while funneling more money to police), but that assessment isn’t completely accurate. Though the 2024-25 budget that was approved did show a deficit, it doesn’t reflect a Memoranda of Understanding that was finalized in November, giving the Los Angeles Fire Department an additional $76 million, council member Bob Blumenfield’s office confirmed, resulting in a $53 million budget increase compared to the previous year.

Still, the LAFD is underfunded in relation to what the city needs. And long before these January fires, officials were saying that the city had outgrown its fire department. It’s understandable that the public would be concerned about resources as greater Los Angeles deals with incredibly damaging, and difficult to contain, fires. But experts say that narrow scope doesn’t capture the full, complicated picture of city budgets, or the resources needed to combat climate change—and the extreme weather it worsens—in a meaningful way.

Multiple jurisdictions at play

Local governments are seeing greater impacts of climate change, and though most have emergency management departments, it’s hard to prepare for something that has never happened before—whether it’s a hurricane that hits the mountains of North Carolina or a wildfire that breaks out during record drought and winds.

For an area like Los Angeles that’s close to so many other cities, it’s not only L.A.’s budget in play. Some of the jurisdictions affected by the fires, like Malibu and Santa Monica, have their own emergency management departments, as well as mutual aid agreements in which neighboring municipalities pledge to help each other out, says Carlos Martín, an architect and engineer who works on housing and disaster preparedness.

“All that to say, it’s a wide range of jurisdictions and government levels playing a role here,” he says (though he notes that most of them are underfunded, which is a broad issue). Cities also rely on counties for funding, and counties then ask state or federal governments for disaster support. More and more, cities are relying on the federal government, Martín says, because “the resources just aren’t there locally, and the damages are way more than anybody ever anticipated.”

(And how much federal funding will be available under incoming President Donald Trump remains to be seen; during California’s deadly 2018 wildfires, he initially withheld disaster aid until he saw that many affected residents voted for him. He’s since reiterated threats to withhold aid in the future.)

Looking beyond budget numbers

Just comparing budget totals doesn’t show the whole picture of what a city is investing in. “Simply cutting a budget or adding to a budget doesn’t mean that’s going to have the [right] impact,” says Jason Grant, director of the International City/County Management Agency (ICMA), a national association of more than 13,000 local government employees. “What are we trying to address?” he asks. “That needs to be the focus.”

If a fire department’s budget was cut and that meant it couldn’t increase capacity or purchase necessary equipment, that’s one thing. If a budget increased because everyone got a raise but no staff was added, would it have made a difference in response? The focus needs to be, “What is it we are funding and not funding,” Grant says, “and how will that help us address the concerns we’re facing here in our community.”

The LAFD does need more funding; cuts to things like overtime have already created operational challenges, the department chief has said. But some of the recent cuts eliminated vacant positions, freeing up money for new classes and gear. And it’s hard to know how much changing the 2024-25 budget would have helped a situation as devastating as this—in which hydrants were tapped in an effort to put out hundreds of house fires, compared to the typical one or two they’re designed for; amid record-high winds that grounded water-dropping aircraft while fanning flames and carrying embers far and wide; and in which a series of climate events coalesced to set up the perfect conditions for disaster. “Our infrastructure is not set up well for this,” Martín says.

There are ways that increasing the budget could have helped, surely, for specific equipment or additional resources. But again, it’s hard to prepare for an unprecedented event.

Preparing for future disasters

Even if the fire department had a larger budget, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that L.A.—or any other city—would be prepared for the next disaster. And allocating funds to emergency response deals with just one aspect of the challenge. Cities also need to invest more money in climate adaptation and mitigation. Studies have found that every $1 invested in disaster mitigation saves up to $13 in disaster losses.

“It’s like taking a pill to prevent the disease versus getting the disease treated afterwards,” Martín says. “That’s the way we have to start thinking about these events: What we used to think of as individual crises [are now] chronic things.”

It’s difficult to turn the conversation about these fires toward that bigger picture when people are suffering now, homes and lives have been lost, and entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. In fact, the fires are still burning, so it’s understandable to focus on the efforts to put them out, and to help people recover. Making sure residents are safe “obviously takes precedence at this moment,” Martín says. But if we can’t also begin to consider mitigation and prevention strategies, “then when are we going to have that conversation?” he asks.

Within a month of Hurricane Harvey’s landfall in Texas in 2017—considered the wettest tropical cyclone on record for the U.S.—officials proposed a major flood control bond measure. Though it wasn’t passed until a year later, the fact that legislators thought about it while Texas was still recovering is notable. It’s also a sign, though, of how we tend to prepare for disasters only in the aftermath of one. Martín hopes others can learn from the L.A. fires to better prepare now, instead of waiting for their own tragedies.

It’s a difficult balance, especially for cities with limited budgets. And it’s a learning process. Climate investments can be a matter of trial and error; they also require long-term thinking that goes well beyond a budget’s framing of one fiscal year. Cities may increase renewable energy and switch school bus fleets to electric as part of their mitigation efforts, but that likely won’t stop a natural disaster from happening the next year. The climate impact of those changes (and the funding they receive) aren’t immediate.

Cities have to balance all these questions: how to prepare, how to mitigate, how to ensure they’re able to respond when something happens, and how to prioritize competing needs. Those conversations are more important, says the ICMA’s Grant says, than “Monday-morning quarterbacking” budget line items while entire neighborhoods burn. “The reality is, we are here. How do we prevent these fires from spreading? How do we make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

As L.A. begins recovering and rebuilding, ideally, the fires will become a milestone event that other cities across the country learn from. Those lessons could inform not only future fire department budgets but also mitigation efforts, building codes and housing laws, insurance policies, and so on. Martín reflects on the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and how its historic devastation led to modern building codes and insurance requirements.

It’s this complex picture of adaptation, mitigation, response, and recovery that city officials must learn to juggle. “The last thing I want to see is people investing so much in their emergency management and first responders,” Martín says, “and not thinking about the long-term planning and equity issues.”